Textiles are depicted throughout the Bayeux Embroidery, beginning with the very first scene (W1; Plate I; Fig. 1) and its plush hangings covering the vaulted ceiling, seat cushion decorated in a lattice-work brocade, and the king’s garment trimmed with distinctive gold-threaded embroidery. The renderings of textiles, including curtains, bed coverings, clothing, sails, and shrouds, constitute some of the most beautiful passages on the hanging. In these representations, the Bayeux Embroidery thematizes its own materiality. The artistry of the stitching also instills awareness that the Bayeux Embroidery is a handcrafted artifact and a physical survivor of the once-extensive medieval textile tradition.

In presenting the Bayeux Embroidery as a material artifact, this chapter has three interrelated objectives. The first is to discuss the textile’s materials and manufacture, a discussion based primarily on its most recent scientific examination in 1982–83 and continuing in a more speculative vein by considering the question of how long it would have taken to make. The second is to examine the embroidery’s two earliest incontrovertible appearances in the historical record, the fifteenth-century notice of it in the inventory of Bayeux Cathedral, and the modern discovery (or rediscovery) of the hanging there in the early eighteenth century. Finally, in the absence of any surviving medieval works on the scale of the Bayeux Embroidery, textual references to textiles often discussed in relation to it, such as the ekphrastic poem of Baudri of Bourgueil (c. 1100) describing a hanging with the story of the Norman Conquest and the gift of a textile by the family of the warrior Byrhtnoth (c. 991) recorded in the mid-twelfth-century Book of Ely, carry additional weight and will be analyzed carefully. These disparate lines of inquiry – materials and manufacture, the documentation of the physical location of the hanging, and textual references – help us to think about the Bayeux Embroidery as a material entity and thus serve to defamiliarize the work frequently referred to as a “text” and as an “historical document,” while providing a stronger foundation for further inquiry.